Post #426,385
11/19/18 9:56:26 AM
11/19/18 9:56:26 AM
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Memories are made of this
A friend has grown exasperated with his Windows notebook (a Toshiba), which has lately tended to seize up on him, or at least to display the Windows equivalent of the Mac’s Spinning Beachball of Death for minutes at a time. He does not seem to be a particularly demanding user—that is to say, he’s not doing video editing or calculating fluid thermodynamics—and his needs would appear to be satisfied could he switch effortlessly between, say, his browser (multiple windows/tabs), a spreadsheet, a word processor, an email client.
The Toshiba has 4GB of RAM and a conventional hard disk. When he asked my advice about a replacement, I first cautioned him that since retirement I no longer splash around in the Windows environment, but opined that his new machine should be outfitted with (a) a solid-state drive and (b) at least 16GB of RAM, my lay diagnosis (extrapolating from what I’d conclude of a Mac displaying like symptoms) being that his unit is having recourse to “virtual memory,” with all the overhead that implies.
What think you, my auditors? Would the configuration I describe likely yield up a happy camper? Anything else I should take into account before I offer up a final recommendation?
cordially,
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Post #426,386
11/19/18 10:08:50 AM
11/19/18 10:08:50 AM
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Chromebooks are very tempting for user-spaces like that.
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Post #426,387
11/19/18 11:06:19 AM
11/19/18 11:06:19 AM
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Wish I'd seen that last week
I'd have jumped on it at $180.
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Post #426,388
11/19/18 1:16:05 PM
11/19/18 1:16:05 PM
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I have a 3yo winders 10 box
4 GB ram use spreadsheet web email no issues what makes my system crawl is Firefox. I have to kill and restart every couple of days "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
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Post #426,389
11/19/18 1:36:19 PM
11/19/18 1:36:19 PM
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Chrome for me
I finally figured out Gmail on Chrome eats/leaks memory like a beast.
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Post #426,390
11/19/18 1:58:04 PM
11/19/18 1:58:04 PM
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Andecdotally, if he has to stick with winders ...
A while back, I bought a Dell 2-in-1 that I've been surprisingly pleased with so far. bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #426,392
11/19/18 2:22:43 PM
11/19/18 2:22:43 PM
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find out what's running behind the scenes
and start deleting unnecessary programs. Then let him play with it for a while. If he is still having problems, then tell him to replace it.
(surprised no one recommended he wipe it clean and install Ubuntu)
Satan (impatiently) to Newcomer: The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous.
- - - Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" 1897
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Post #426,394
11/19/18 6:38:28 PM
11/19/18 6:38:28 PM
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as to Ubuntu
This is a lay user. He has zero interest in knowing what goes on under the hood.
cordially,
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Post #426,397
11/19/18 7:33:21 PM
11/19/18 7:39:59 PM
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2 other popular reasons for Windows to go the beach
Accumulated NTFS cruft and HDD problems.
Windows will accumulate NTFS metadata borkage and over time, that will lead to all kinds of problems.
It can also be a sign the HDD is starting to crap out. The HDD hardware will only try to correct problems when the bad sectors are being written to. The Windows area is mostly read-only, so a defect in a non-critical file will let the OS load after umpteen retries. If so, the problem may stick around until the thing finally fails. (Not a certainty by far, but I've dealt with enough cases where a dud HDD was the cause.)
Both can be addressed by requesting a CHKDSK C: /F /R scan on reboot from an admin CMD window. (Staging it from Windows Explorer usually does not go Full Monty and will leave the problems unaddressed.)
Same CMD window can also be used to check on the HDD SMART status (which may as well be called DUMB status as usually it is the last place for problems to be flagged) FWIW:
wmic diskdrive get status
Edited by scoenye
Nov. 19, 2018, 07:39:59 PM EST
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Post #426,403
11/20/18 12:47:36 PM
11/20/18 12:47:36 PM
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Details?
"... requesting a CHKDSK C: /F /R scan on reboot from an admin CMD window."
Does that mean reboot and when it comes up you request that? How do you get an admin CMD window on boot?
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Post #426,405
11/20/18 4:22:35 PM
11/20/18 4:22:35 PM
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I believe that when you request it, it will say it has to do it on startup.
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Post #426,407
11/20/18 6:17:57 PM
11/20/18 6:17:57 PM
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Correct
Launch CMD from a regular desktop session, but you have to use the "Run as admin" option from the context menu. The boot drive is mounted and that will trigger a "Do you want to schedule this on the next boot?" prompt. Answer Y and reboot.
If all goes well, you'll get a "last chance to abort" screen and then CHKDSK will go off to the races.
Depending on the size of the HDD and the amount of work needed to piece things back together, it is not unusual for this to take an hour or more.
Some laptops also have a non-destructive HDD test in the BIOS. It may be worth looking in to that first. These days the option just exercises the HDD's built-in diagnostics. There's a 2 minute short version which will catch 90% of problems and a long version which will check the entire platter. Run the short test first. If it passes, run the long one. If either fails => time to replace the disk.
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Post #426,410
11/20/18 10:58:17 PM
11/20/18 10:58:18 PM
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Thanks, will kick off before bed tonight
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Post #426,412
11/21/18 9:10:38 AM
11/21/18 9:10:38 AM
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That wasn't what I expected
I never even saw a progress bar or spinner. It completed nearly instantly. So quickly, in fact, that I strongly suspect it didn't actually scan anything.
Is there any log file I can check to see what it did?
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Post #426,414
11/21/18 10:30:01 AM
11/21/18 10:30:01 AM
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Re: That wasn't what I expected
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Post #426,415
11/21/18 10:42:02 AM
11/21/18 10:42:02 AM
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This isn't SSD
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Post #426,417
11/21/18 6:37:09 PM
11/21/18 6:37:09 PM
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Indeed not
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Post #426,420
11/21/18 11:31:08 PM
11/21/18 11:31:08 PM
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Trying again tonight, thanks
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Post #426,423
11/22/18 11:39:07 AM
11/22/18 11:39:07 AM
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Well, it ran ...
Any way to see what it found?
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Post #426,424
11/22/18 5:24:16 PM
11/22/18 5:24:16 PM
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Application event log
Look for the wininit and chkdsk event sources
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Post #426,428
11/23/18 3:56:44 AM
11/23/18 3:56:44 AM
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Re: Well, it ran ...
check the link I gave above
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Post #426,429
11/23/18 10:01:33 AM
11/23/18 10:01:33 AM
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Nothing interesting
Guess the disk is OK, just bogged down running recent Windows on old hardware.
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Post #426,401
11/20/18 2:18:34 AM
11/20/18 2:18:34 AM
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SSD and a clean install = fixed
16GB for regular office/desktop use is 100% unnecessary and, in the current RAM marketplace, expensive. 8GB is fine now and for the foreseeable future. 4GB will be entirely usable on an SSD-based system. Windows isn't the memory hog that MacOS is. Edge is a fine replacement for Chrome unless you're all invested in Chrome remembering your passwords etc. A Chromebook can work, but I'm here to tell you that the online versions of Office are not as nice as the desktop apps. Every modern operating system pages almost everything, almost all the time. (long and excellent post about paging in Windows: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=21013929#p21013929 )
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Post #426,406
11/20/18 5:07:58 PM
11/20/18 5:07:58 PM
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Re: SSD and a clean install = fixed
This seems like sound advice, and I will pass it on. Has RAM become latterly more costly?
cordially,
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Post #426,408
11/20/18 9:01:31 PM
11/20/18 9:01:31 PM
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I'm going to second the 4Gb RAM thing.
Both my current Surface Pro and the previous one I had came with 4Gb of RAM. Never noticed any issues with it because of that, although I was a little surprised when I found out. Next models up all had 8Gb.
Microsoft knew what they were doing.
Wade.
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Post #426,411
11/21/18 7:49:59 AM
11/21/18 7:49:59 AM
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That was because of the Outlook webmail portal ;-)
That thing will balloon to using over 1GB RAM resident (as will any other O365 web application). I don't want to know what Facebook runs away with. 4GB is definitely cutting it short these days, even for the use Rand described because of things like this that no one really pays attention to (or even suspects because "I only have the internet open")
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Post #426,422
11/22/18 12:56:47 AM
11/22/18 12:56:47 AM
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Yabut I don't use those.
My email client is Opera Mail which is pretty frugal memory wise. I also use Vivaldi which has much better memory usage than Chrome.
Wade.
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Post #426,425
11/22/18 6:00:10 PM
11/22/18 6:00:10 PM
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We may not
But most people who do not have a techie type available do. And they mostly use whatever came preinstalled.
(My observation was on Chromiumm and Firefox. Both were about the same for the Outlook page. The O365 admin page is even worse at 1.5+GB but few would have to deal with that thing.)
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Post #426,409
11/20/18 9:55:57 PM
11/20/18 9:55:57 PM
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Prices have been falling since the bitminers stopped buying everything.
Graphics cards are finally coming back to earth, too.
About a month ago I bought a couple of mid 2012 MBPs and RAM and SSDs to upgrade them:
860 EVO 1TB SSD $163 ea
Crucial 2x8GB 204 pin SODIMM $124
from Big River.
Getting back to your original question and Peter's and Sven's comments, it does sound like the hard drive has issues and could use being replaced. Maybe chkdsk would fix it up, but unless it's filled with spyware and trojans and the like, then one has to assume that the hardware will just eat itself again reasonably soon. As you know, swapping out a HD for a SSD isn't hard, but the time involved reinstalling everything can make simply punting for a newer machine much more appealing.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
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